KAREN MAZURKEWICH
Vice-president of stakeholder relations and communications, Toronto Pearson
Remember “fake news”? The term has fallen off a bit lately, but actual fake news is proliferating right under our noses these days, generated by bots at industrial scale without human oversight, fine-tuned for virality and published with no accountability. If you’re a passenger with a flight to catch, you may already be consuming it.
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly common at work and on social media, our media team at Toronto Pearson has been charting the rise of artificial intelligence-generated articles about operations at our airport and others around the world. Clickbait websites and social accounts are using bots, generative AI and viral distribution methods to source and write articles with inaccurate information about on-time performance, delays and cancellations at airports around the world. Fake and exaggerated flight information ends up in your social feeds and search results, where it’s up to you to decide whether to trust it.
Naturally, the fear is that you and other passengers consuming this information will make misinformed decisions about arriving early or late, cancelling reservations or rebooking flights that don’t need to be rebooked. These mass-generated articles could start creating problems for passengers and system that didn’t previously exist.
The great irony is that AI is emerging as a tool for airports to reduce delays and cancellations and streamline operations. At Toronto Pearson, the airport authority and its partners use AI to streamline gate turnaround times, screen passengers, forecast passenger volume, pre-empt baggage breakdowns, crunch data, spot runway debris and more. The problem isn’t AI in general, but the specific use case of using it to replace human judgement in creating, distributing and consuming content.
In addition to inaccuracies, algorithmic content gets cranked out at a pace well beyond what humans can write or even read. At least half of all web articles are already AI-generated, according to a recent study by digital marketing firm Graphite. It’s a perfect combination for misinformation at scale. Bots start with common human search prompts, scour the Internet for what looks like new information, then spit out torrents of content on the topic, making sure to insert the perfect number of key words or hashtags to maximize virality.
At Pearson, my team started noticing this coverage toward the end of 2025, and it’s ramped up in the first half of 2026. Many days, we now see multiple articles generated across half a dozen sites. And that’s just about our airport.
I know from conversations with colleagues around North America’s airports that they too are watching these content machines, in part because they’re in the crosshairs but mostly because flight status is the subject of so many passenger search prompts. Airports, airlines and passengers are already being influenced and it’s only getting worse.
We recently received multiple interview requests from Toronto and national news outlets originating in a single report from one of these sites, Travel Tourister, which post near-daily articles about “flight chaos” at Pearson and other airports. The numbers cited there were inflated by more than 50 percent over the accurately sourced information we had on our website. I won’t link to the site, because it appears to publish its pieces solely for the purpose of driving clicks to the site’s package tour offerings.
A regular offender is a site called The Traveler, which cranks out reams of airport and airline articles under bot bylines. Some of the site’s “authors,” using bylines like Vanessa Jackson and William R. Martin, pen dozens or even 100 or more 1,000-word articles a day about travel disruptions around the world, a volume of output no actual human can approach. The site’s business model is alluded to in the fine print: search-engine hits, clicks on affiliate-sales links and sponsored advertorial.
Another is located right here in Toronto, where a company called Cloud3 Agency has launched an Instagram account called “Toronto Digest” that posts clicky, incorrect content about airport operations and other subjects driven by common Toronto search terms. We know Cloud3’s motivations because it explains them on its website: “Programmatic content structures [allow] Toronto Digest to rank for thousands of local-intent searches while feeding social traffic into owned channels.”
The message is clear. AI generates a lot of viral but highly unreliable content that’s impervious to all attempts at correction. Whatever you’re reading online, be savvy about its origins. And if it’s about a flight, go straight to the source – your airline or airport of departure – lest you create the exact disruption you were trying to avoid.